


Solipsism

by zulu



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Community: hl_bday_drive, Drug Use, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-29
Updated: 2010-10-29
Packaged: 2017-10-13 12:45:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zulu/pseuds/zulu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solipsism

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Philtrum](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Philtrum).



> Thank you to thedeadparrot and bell for the betas.

The first time Wilson springs him from Mayfield, it's with tight-lipped impatience. Backlit against the windows at the end of the hall, he scratches his signature across the sheafs of forms. He speaks tersely to the charge nurse, and then gets involved in a quiet, heated argument with the on-call doctor, but at last he comes for House with a wheelchair and an orderly. The orderly lifts House by main force into the chair, taking no care for his leg. House is shaking so badly that the extra pain doesn't even register.

House manages not to vomit in Wilson's car by sheer force of will. He makes his offering to the gutter in front of Amber's apartment instead. Wilson digs his shoulder into House's armpit on his bad side, and drags him step by agonizing step up to the door. There's a blur, and then the bathroom. Wilson leaves him heaving his empty stomach over the toilet bowl while he goes back for House's suitcase. He's already started the bathwater running, thundering and steamy, into the claw-footed tub. The sound of rushing water echoes off the tiles and pounds in House's throbbing head.

It's been months, but even Wilson can't suspect how far House went in the last few days before Mayfield. House was here for Chase's bachelor party. He had time.

It only takes a minute before his shaking fingers find the pill bottle wedged behind the toilet tank. The steam blurs and his eyes close in a desperate, blind prayer, until everything goes black.

When he wakes up, he's back in the sterile, barred hospital room, with nothing but a plastic bucket for company. His throat burns, whether from stomach acid or his own screams. House never had much hope of escaping--that last stunt must have nuked Wilson's trust from orbit--but he lost the rest of it at that moment.

***

The second time Wilson comes for him, he opens the door to House's room and surveys him from the threshold, his hands on his hips and a muted, unhappy look on his face. House can't believe that even Wilson has fallen for his promises again. It has to be pity that's brought him here, but House is ready to take Wilson however he comes. House shifts restlessly and feels the stinging, leaking bedsores on his back and ass where he's rubbed his skin raw against the rough cotton of the hospital pyjamas. "I thought you'd written me off," he says. His voice is so hoarse it sounds like he has rocks scraping together in his throat instead of vocal cords.

"I can't leave you like this," Wilson says. It's not meant to be comforting. Wilson can't leave House like this and he hates himself for it. Wilson's not talking about leaving House in the wretched mess he's made of the sheets, rumpled and piss-smelling. House deserves all the DTs he's going through. They both know it. Wilson thinks the withdrawal is good for him--or will be, if House survives it. Hell, if all Wilson cared about was House's pain, then he'd let House stay doped to the gills. But Wilson won't let it be that simple. He also cares about House's liver, and House's future, and House's mythical _happiness_. If Wilson can't leave House like this, suffering for a higher cause, it's because Wilson's too weak. He's giving in.

House doesn't care. They wheel him out into the fresh air. He takes the first breath in what feels like weeks that doesn't smell like his own shitty, sweaty body. They wash him every day, sometimes every shift, but the rough sponge baths have never once made House feel clean.

Wilson takes him home to his own apartment this time. He must have been through the entire place with a fine-toothed comb and a drug-sniffing dog. But Wilson never knew about the box on top of the bookshelf. House waits until Wilson slumps into a restless, mumbling sleep, sitting half-upright on the couch. He pushes down the nausea that rises up to strangle him and forces himself to move. He fights for every step to carry the step ladder to the shelf and set it down without a sound.

Wilson is going to wake up; he has to. House's leg can't possibly support him when he reaches high enough to find the edges of the box with his fingertips. He'll collapse when he cradles it against his ribs as he climbs down.

But he makes it, and Wilson doesn't stir. When House unlocks the box, he finds one syringe left in its sterile packaging. He ties off his bicep and watches the vein inside his elbow plump up. His heart is racing. Morphine beads at the tip of the syringe when he lifts it to check for air bubbles. Then the cold, clear rush breaks over him and turns the world black.

House wakes up in the hospital room again, leather cuffs tying him spread-eagled to the bed frame. He screams every insult he knows at the blank-faced nurses, wrenching his body off the mattress, but they won't even do him the favour of putting him under. He collapses, voice broken, lungs spasming, as the pain crawls out of the darkness after him.

***

The third time, House shudders out of a deep, paralyzing sleep to find Wilson sitting on the edge of his bed. He's holding his face was in hands and his breathing is soft and ragged.

When Wilson squeezes the bridge of his nose and lifts his head, turning to House, his eyes are bloodshot and his lips crimp tightly downwards. "House, when you get out of here," he says, and stops. He laughs softly, bitterly. "If you ever get out of here. I don't want to do this again." He pauses. "I don't want to see you again."

Wilson stands up and knocks to be let out. House's last sight of him is the wrenching shudder of Wilson's shoulders as he disappears into the shadowy hallway.

Screws hold the metal bed frame together. House tears three nails to the quick by the time he loosens one screw, but the tip is sharp enough that one is all he needs.

When he wakes up in his night-black room in four-point restraints, he's actually relieved, because maybe that means it never really happened.

***

The fourth time, it's Cuddy. She's with the ward nurse when they unlock his room in the morning, and she's grim and silent as the nurse takes his vitals and calls the orderly in to clean him.

"What the hell are you doing to yourself?" she asks when they've gone, and he's dressed in another pair of hospital-issue pyjamas, grey as washwater. "Actually, forget _yourself_. House, what you've done to Wilson..."

House works his dry, burning throat to ask if she's only come to blame him. "Didn't notice him nearly dying," he mutters. His voice is a low, broken rasp. His shoulders curve in anticipation of the lash of Cuddy's words, but she snaps her mouth shut and doesn't speak at all after that.

So it happened. Part of House wants to argue that it's his right to do any damn thing he wants to his own body, that he fucking needed it, just a goddamn _second_ without the pain. He scowls in silence instead, too stubborn to justify himself, too trapped in his own skull to separate out his fury from the frantic, shocky grief at what he's lost. If Wilson's gone, if Wilson's finally run out of ways to care or excuse him, then the torment in House's leg doesn't matter. The neurasthenic pain sizzling along his nerves from too much Vicodin and then too little isn't important. An overdose only means a brief escape from his own skin. There has to be a better way.

"This isn't working, House," Cuddy says. She pulls out a syringe and yanks the sleeve of his pyjamas up to his shoulder. With a brisk, professional movement, she's plunged the needle deep into his bicep and depressed the plunger. "From now on, I'll be controlling your methadone doses. You won't have access to the supply or to the key, and if you even think about getting around me, you'll only be right back here." She pulls out the needle and rubs her thumb across the injection site. Her expression is cold and sad when she leans close to check his pupils. She closes her eyes briefly before sighing and pulling herself straight. "House, please. Make it work this time."

They make it outside, House confined to the same rickety wheelchair. Cuddy drives him to his apartment, and House leans back against the headrest. The methadone kicks in and House wants to believe it's relief that tightens his throat and burns behind his eyes. He's so tired. His lungs ache. It hurts to pull in another breath.

He has enough time to think that Cuddy must have misjudged the dose, to recognize that they must be thirty miles from the nearest defibrillator, and then his heart slams once and goes still.

When he wakes up back in the hospital room, every bone in his chest feels like it's been cracked to the marrow. House barely manages to roll over before he vomits into the bucket beside his bed. When his stomach contents have burned past his breastbone and up his throat, he turns his face into his damp, vinegary pillow and cries.

***

No matter how many days pass, the withdrawal never ends. House dreads every night because there's not even the routine of nurses and orderlies to use as markers for the passing time. There's only the blinding darkness, and it lasts longer every time.

But the whispered arguments outside his door come some time after midnight. The lock clicks open and a vague orange light falls in from the hall. House squints and lifts his head enough to see Foreman leading Cameron and Chase into his room.

"Oh, my God," Cameron whispers. She rushes to his side and squeezes his hand. She takes out a handkerchief and wipes House's mouth, then checks his temp with a soft hand against his forehead. "House, we're going to get you out of here," she says, tears standing out in her eyes.

"And then what?" he says, at once furious at them for seeing him like this and contemptuous that they think this is going to work. There's no where to take him. No where to go.

They don't listen. Chase brings a wheelchair to the bed, and he and Foreman haul House into it. Cameron bundles a coat over his shoulders as Chase pushes him out of the room. Foreman handles the night nurse, insisting that they've had this patient transfer scheduled for a week, and she can call Princeton-Plainsboro if she needs confirmation that badly. House imagines that they have enough cunning that they have Taub standing by on the other end of the phone in case she does call, because otherwise they're all too stupid to live.

"What the hell is this?" he snaps when they've manhandled him into Chase's car. He can pretty much imagine that Foreman vetoed the use of his car the instant they thought up this plan.

"I think it counts as a prison break," Chase says calmly from behind the wheel. Foreman, sitting shotgun, snorts and crosses his arms across his chest.

"House, you have to snap out of this," Cameron says. She's sitting beside him, holding his hand. She squeezes tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. Earnest, pleading, she says, "The Vicodin was enough for years. You were fine--"

"What definition of fine--" Foreman starts, but Cameron shuts him down with a glare.

"You were _handling_ it," Cameron insists. "If we can get you stabilized, you can show Cuddy that you're better."

House is shaking his head, but Cameron keeps up a steady murmur as they drive towards Princeton. How he'll get his license back, how he just needs to be careful, how Wilson will understand--

House tunes her out. They arrive at his apartment and usher him inside, like they're holding the clandestine meeting of some secret society. Cameron's practically wringing her hands. "Maybe I should stay," she says. "Just for tonight."

"You don't need to," Chase says, rolling his eyes in exasperation. "You're the one who was saying there's nothing more we can do. Let's go before we wake up the whole building."

Reluctantly, Cameron follows him. Foreman watches them go, and lets the door swing halfway closed behind them.

House sinks down on the couch, shaky and shivering. If Foreman would go too, then at least he'd be left in peace. "What the hell do you want?"

Foreman reaches in to his coat pocket and takes out a pill bottle. It's full. House jerks his chin up to meet Foreman's stony glare.

"You know what, House?" Foreman says. He comes over to the couch, a contemptuous sneer on his face. "I don't think you can do it. After what you did to Wilson, I don't think you can _handle_ anything at all."

"Then why give me these?" House grates.

"If Cameron's right, you'll only take what you need," Foreman says. He tilts his head and sticks House with a pitying stare. "But if she's not, then do it right this time, House. Nobody needs to suffer this much over you. Finish the job and let your friends off the hook."

He drops the bottle, the pills rattling quietly, into House's lap, and shuts the door firmly as he leaves.

House closes his fist around the pill bottle. His fingers are shaking so badly that he can't grip the cap at first. Frustration at his own weakness makes him shudder even more, but finally the cap pops off, and House spills the pills into his palm. With thumb and forefinger, he nudges through the pile and picks out just one and squeezes it. He has to slow his breath from desperate, gulping gasps, before he can finally swallow the pill.

When he wakes up in his hospital room, he doesn't remember anything but blackness where the ambulance ride and the stomach pumping should have been. Traumatic memory loss. It's just as well, because he's left with nothing to curl around but the bitter shame of failing Cameron and Foreman both.

***

The sixth time he's released is the worst yet, because it's Wilson again, and House was sure he'd never see Wilson again. Wilson shakes his head over the thinness of House's wrist as he takes his pulse with a light, strong touch. "Should I even hope that you've learned anything?" he asks.

House narrows his eyes and bites back his suspicious questions. Cuddy must have worn Wilson down. Or Cameron threw herself into his arms and cried out her guilt on his shoulder. House is certain Chase was the one who called the ambulance for him. Only Chase would have gone along with Cameron's hope and then made the right call at the right time. "I never learn," House says spitefully. "You know that."

The sigh Wilson lets out certainly sounds like Wilson, like a slightly miffed and put-out Wilson. Not like the hollow-eyed, dishevelled wreck he'd been last time. House peers at him, looking for the dark bags under Wilson's eyes, the tight lines around his mouth, any sign that he's doing this against his better judgement. But Wilson only seems annoyed, as if House being committed to a psychiatric facility is a minor prank.

House tosses back the two Vicodin Wilson dispenses to him in a tiny paper cup, setting his jaw and dry-swallowing. "Cuddy ask you to come?" he asks. "Did she get on her knees to beg?"

Wilson takes the handles of the wheelchair the orderly has delivered and gives House a mildly disgusted grimace. "Much as I know you'd love to learn that Cuddy convinces people to do her bidding by offering blowjobs, no, she didn't speak with me."

"Longing looks, then?" House shifts to sit in the wheelchair. He looks over his shoulder, not trusting Wilson for a second. "Something convinced you."

"Must you interrogate _every_ favour someone does for you?" Wilson asks. He sounds as if they're playing a game of witty repartee. He sounds... _fine_.

Unsettled, House hunches in the wheelchair as Wilson pushes him outside. House glares out the car window in obstinate silence. Wilson takes the hint and drives with a quietly thoughtful look on his face. They make it back to Amber's apartment. Wilson scrubs the back of his neck as they both contemplate the stairs up to the door. Wordlessly, he pulls House's cane out of the backseat of his car and hands it too him. He waits for House to make his own way up the steps, not hurrying him or making asinine remarks.

House sets himself and works his way up the steps. He's weak, but the Vicodin masks the pain, and he makes it to the top without asking Wilson for help. Wilson stays at his side without making it look like what it is, and then he opens the apartment door.

Amber smiles at him from the threshold.

House's throat closes off his breath. Every throb of his heart screams denial. Amber is dead. She's dead. She can't be standing in Wilson's doorway. She can't be smiling at him as if she's welcoming him home. It's a hallucination, a relapse. She's only in his mind.

And then Wilson steps forward with a pleased, happy grin on his face and Amber kisses him hello. They both turn back and smile at House. Amber's eyes twinkle. She holds out one hand, to help him up the last step.

House recoils. He steps back, where there is no step. His weight falls on his right leg. There's a bolt of pain as it collapses under him, and then he's falling.

It's all a fucking lie. House wakes up in his hospital room, and the pyjamas he's wearing are the same ones he was wearing before Wilson came for him, and the sheets are damp with his sweat.

***

The hallucinations haven't ended. House feels thick and stupid that he didn't figure it out the very first time. But the delusions are so fucking realistic, even now that he knows they aren't real. He can't ever tell that they're fake, not while they're happening. Every discharge _might_ be real, and he only knows it isn't when he wakes up still lying in his hospital bed.

***

Sometimes Thirteen and Taub come for him. Sometimes it's Kutner. Once it's even Stacy, her palm cool and soothing against his cheek. Sometimes the delusions last a few hours, and sometimes they last for days. Sometimes he's transferred to Princeton-Plainsboro for an experimental cure; sometimes he makes it back to his own apartment where he's left, once again, too terribly alone. No matter what he tries, he never dies. Once he drags a razor blade down the full length of his antecubital vein. Blood wells up, thick and dark and endless, but when House wakes up, there isn't even a wound.

***

Somewhere outside his own mind, time must be passing. The Vicodin is gradually being flushed from his system, and the chemical receptors in his brain are resetting so that they don't register opioids as pain. But in the delusions, the bed is always the same, and there's no guarantee he's not hallucinating it too. It's possible that he never even made it to Mayfield. A second can become a year; the brain can play tricks with time so complete that some patients refuse to believe they haven't aged. House gives up after that. He goes with who comes for him, and then he ends the hallucination as soon as he can, just so that he doesn't have to hope.

***

Once, long after he loses track of how many times he's been wheeled out of his room, a nurse opens the door and says, "You've been transferred upstairs." An orderly takes his elbow and leads him, not out the front door, but to the elevators at the end of the hall. Upstairs is another ward, with more open space and other patients, where they drag him into group therapy for forty-five minutes every morning and prod him to go outside to pace the fenced yard for an hour after lunch.

House sleeps restlessly on his new bed, wrenching awake in sweat-starting fear every night, expecting the blue moonlight to reveal Amber watching him from the corner of his room, laughter soft on her lips.

She's never there. After a few weeks, House gives up cheeking his meds, because there's no where to hide a stash big enough to do the job, even if he thought it would work. One day, Beasley offers to call Wilson in on visitors' day, but House shakes his head, one icy hand rubbing the opposite wrist, where there aren't any ligature marks at all. Dr. Nolan invites House to his office after that, and after pacing like a caged cat for half a dozen sessions, House lets slip the hallucinations.

"And now you're worried that you're trapped in your own mind," Nolan says, making a note. "It's perfectly understandable, House, under the circumstances."

House grits his teeth at being _perfectly understandable_. It sounds ridiculous, even to him, to argue that Nolan's not real, that none of it is. There's no afterlife, there's nothing waiting on some hypothetical other side. There's what he thinks and what he does, and after a few more grudging sessions in Nolan's office, House admits he wants to get better.

He's sitting on the piano bench, elbows on knees, watching his tapping toe fixedly, when Wilson walks onto the ward. House knows he's there almost as soon as Wilson arrives. Wilson's voice checking in with Beasley sounds mild and terribly, wonderfully familiar. House swallows, but doesn't look up. Wilson comes over to him, pulls up a chair, and takes a cautious seat in front of him.

"How are you feeling?" he asks, with the brittle deliberation of someone who knows exactly how much House hates stupid questions.

"Locked up in a mental ward for over two months," House snaps, "and treating chronic pain with Aleve. Or should I get more specific?"

"I think I can extrapolate," Wilson says, tired amusement colouring his voice. "I don't suppose you've been cooperating with your doctors?"

House finally lifts his head. Wilson looks tired, but not exhausted; careworn, but not fragile. He's smiling faintly, and House's heart thumps suddenly hard, and he has to glare in order not to show how welcome Wilson is.

"But since when have you cooperated with your doctors?" Wilson asks rhetorically after House doesn't answer. He leans back in his chair, sighing and settling in.

"I'm here, aren't I?" House says mulishly. This is when Wilson will mention Amber, how he's sorry she couldn't make it, how she convinced him to give House one last chance; or maybe she'll appear in the doorway, laughing lightly as she crosses the room and leans down to kiss Wilson and call him _James_.

"Somehow I doubt your mere presence represents capitulation," Wilson says.

A grin touches House's lips before he can stop himself. His eyes flick to the door, then back to Wilson. Amber's not there, because Amber is dead. House's whole body is strung tight, and sweat soaks his armpits. But Wilson stays the mandated half-hour and then says an awkward goodbye, as if he's not sure how to say he'll be back.

The next four visitors' days go like that. Stilted small talk that slowly shifts to laughing over Cuddy's last Mata Hari takedown of the board of directors, to how Foreman nearly killed the last patient who came to Diagnostics with nothing worse than cerebral meningitis. They don't talk about Amber. No matter what Nolan says, it's not going to help.

"Nolan thinks you're doing well," Wilson says, at the end of his latest visit. He's fidgeting almost as much as House is, and he's not even jonesing for the day's single cigarette break. Wilson clears his throat. "He says you might be ready to come home."

House sneers automatically at the idea of _home_. "No," he says.

Wilson moves his hands restlessly, as if he wants to wave House's objections away. "Is this still about the hallucinations?" he asks. "You haven't had one in the past three months."

"As long as this isn't a hallucination," House says, feeling belligerent enough to tell the truth.

Wilson scrubs the back of his neck with one hand. "House, I want you to come home," he says. "This is real. You're recovering."

"You've said that before," House says. A hundred other Wilsons have given the same goddamn lecture. Telling him that believing he's hallucinating makes him even more self-centered than he already was. That there's no recorded type of hallucination that lasts for months. House knows that. He's more on edge every day waiting for it to end. He spooks at corners and he's disgustingly glad that Alvie sleeps with a night light, so that House doesn't have to confess that he needs one too. He hasn't even told Nolan about some of the times before, when he's slept with Cuddy, or Cameron, or whoever dragged him out of his own filth, only to ruin it by being himself, and watch as they leave him. About the times Wilson takes him back to his apartment and then breaks down, shouting at House that he's the reason Amber died; once, pushing House up against a wall and kissing him with desperate strength.

Every time, there was only one way out. House will stay in Mayfield forever if he needs to, if it's the only way to be better.

But they discharge him anyway. "House, we're not in the habit of keeping healthy people locked up," Nolan tells him. He signs House out himself, squeezes his shoulder when he opens Mayfield's front door for him.

Wilson's waiting beside his car, his hair ruffled by the grey fall wind. House takes the steps slowly, clutching his suitcase in one hand and leaning heavily on his cane. They drive back to Princeton in silence. Wilson cooks pasta for dinner in House's kitchen, and they stay up late watching old movies on House's couch. It's past midnight when Wilson nods off, arms crossed, slumped back against the cushions.

House watches him, fear curling colder and deeper in his stomach the tireder he gets. He suddenly reaches across the couch and shoves Wilson's shoulder, making him jump. "Will you still be here when I wake up?" he demands.

"Of course," Wilson says, in annoyed resignation. "House, of course I'll be here."

House eyes him warily, but he stumps back to his bedroom and slides under the cool, clean sheets, and closes his eyes. His body shudders, out of his control. House breathes out and in until his shivers still. Wilson won't leave him again.

But when he wakes up, he's in his pitch-black hospital room. Amber lies next to him on the narrow mattress, her fingertips trailing through his buzzed-short hair, and she smiles her soft, knowing smile.


End file.
